With the release of their latest draft on Thursday, Senate Republican leaders have spent more than two-and-a-half months writing an overhaul of the nation’s health-care system behind closed doors.

It now may die before ever seeing an up-or-down vote.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s revised bill to partially repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act drew swift opposition from two Republican senators on either side of the party’s ideological spectrum, Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. But what was particularly notable about their positions is that Collins and Paul are not merely vowing to vote against the final legislation—they would block it from even coming up for debate next week. If just one more of the 50 remaining Republican senators joins them, McConnell’s bill—and the party’s broader promise to dismantle Obamacare—would be finished.

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Procedure is everything in the Senate, home to the filibuster and dozens of other examples of parliamentary arcana. The first step in calling up McConnell’s bill is a motion to proceed to debate, which under the rules Republicans are following is subject to the same 51-vote threshold as a vote on final passage. (The GOP is already structuring the legislation to skirt the 60-vote threshold that would face a Democratic filibuster.) Democrats won’t lift a finger to help McConnell after he shut them out of negotiations, so he’ll need at least 50 of the 52 Republicans. If he holds everyone but Collins and Paul, Vice President Mike Pence could break a tie to get the bill on the floor.

McConnell’s problem is that at least five other Republicans haven’t committed to debating the bill, much less voting for its passage. “We’re not there yet,” Senator Rob Portman told Politico when asked if he’d support the motion to proceed. The Ohio Republican had just come out of a meeting with other holdouts and the majority leader, who was undoubtedly trying to persuade them to at least give the bill a chance. Senators Dean Heller of Nevada, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia also told reporters they were undecided on the question, and a spokesman for Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a conservative, told me the same. “The new Senate health-care bill is substantially different from the version released last month and it is unclear to me whether it has improved,” Lee said in a statement late Thursday afternoon.

In a floor speech earlier in the day, McConnell made an explicit plea to those senators to support the procedural vote. “I hope every senator will vote to open debate,” he said. “Because that’s how you change the status quo.”

Voting against the motion to proceed to debate could be seen as a cop-out, and the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt quickly assailed Collins in particular for “pure political cowardice.” Supporting the procedural motion does not commit a lawmaker to voting for final passage, and indeed, there’s a case to be made that a bill that has had no public hearings or debate deserves at least some formal airing. Yet Republicans leery of the bill’s unpopularity know that Democrats will criticize them merely for helping to advance it even if they eventually vote it down. And they might worry that it will be even tougher to oppose the bill’s final passage once the pressure builds during the floor debate.

“I’d say the only thing more difficult than peace between Israel and the Palestinians is health care.”

Having already postponed debate once, McConnell is intent on voting next week and doesn’t want to drag out the health-care fight any longer. And voting to begin debate would just launch another gauntlet—albeit one that might last only a couple of days. Under the budget reconciliation rules Republicans are using, the bill will be subject to nearly unlimited amendments, so wavering senators will have an opportunity to change it on the floor. But without help from Democrats, winning consensus on any one amendment among Republicans might be just as difficult as the arduous attempt to write the bill in the first place.

For McConnell, the good news is that most of the holdouts are still listening, and talking. As I wrote earlier this week, any three Republicans could end the repeal effort immediately by vowing to oppose a one-party bill and demanding negotiations with Democrats. So far only Collins is in that camp, and even she has left the door open to backing a GOP bill with significant changes. McConnell also still has more money to offer individual senators—or more precisely, their states—in an effort to win their votes. The revised bill already includes a provision designed to help Alaska in particular, which could turn Murkowski from a no to a yes.

The bad news for the majority leader is that there are plenty more obstacles that await the Senate bill, and he has no margin for error. The first is a fresh analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, which is expected on Monday. Portman and Capito, among others, have specifically pointed to the CBO as an important factor in their vote. And because McConnell has kept the original bill’s deep cuts to Medicaid largely in place, the budget office is likely to again find that millions more people would be uninsured as a result of the GOP bill. If that total is anywhere close to the 22 million that CBO estimated would lose coverage under the original Senate proposal, Portman and Capito would have little reason to vote for the bill. The same goes for Heller, who is already facing renewed pressure to oppose the legislation from his GOP governor, Brian Sandoval, who said the new plan was still cause for “great concern.”

McConnell won the support of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas by provisionally including a version of his amendment to allow insurers to sell bare-bones policies that don’t cover people with preexisting conditions (among other benefits) as long as they offer at least one plan that conforms to Obamacare’s standards. But Senate aides and health-care experts believe that provision could make the CBO score far worse, jeopardizing the support of moderates. And that amendment along with other parts of the Republican bill still face challenges that they don’t abide by the reconciliation rules, which limit policy-making in the legislation to budgetary matters.

The dynamic has been the same for months in a Senate majority that’s not as big as Republicans, and particularly President Trump, would like to believe. “I’d say the only thing more difficult than peace between Israel and the Palestinians is health care,” the president told reporters on Air Force One, with apparently only some exaggeration. “It’s like this narrow road that [is only] about a quarter of an inch wide. You get a couple here and you say, ‘Great,’ and then you find out you just lost four over here.

“Health care is tough,” Trump concluded. He is correct about that. Republican lawmakers that once used procedural roadblocks to stymie Democrats are now considering using the same ones against themselves. And if just one more senator joins a rare intra-party blockade, the culmination of a seven-year health-care drive might never make it to the floor.

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In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that preceded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

In excusing his Arrested Development castmate’s verbal abuse of Jessica Walter, the actor showed how Hollywood has justified bad behavior for generations.

“What we do for a living is not normal,” Jason Bateman said in Wednesday’s New York Times interviewwith the cast of Arrested Development, in an effort to address his co-star Jeffrey Tambor’s admitted verbal abuse of Jessica Walter. “Therefore the process is not normal sometimes, and to expect it to be normal is to not understand what happens on set. Again, not to excuse it.” As Hollywood continues to grapple with widespread revelations of hostile work environments, institutional sexism, and sexual misconduct on and off set, Bateman insisted that he wasn’t trying to explain away an actor’s bad behavior—while displaying, over and over, exactly how his industry does it.

Bateman’s glaring mistake in the interview—for which he has already apologized—is how he rushed to defend Tambor from Walter’s account of Tambor screaming at her on the set of Arrested Development years ago. In doing so, Bateman defaulted to every entrenched cultural script of minimizing fault, downplaying misbehavior, and largely attributing Tambor’s verbal harassment to the unique, circumstantial pressures of acting—a process, he suggested, most onlookers could not hope to understand.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The bombastic legal adviser to Stormy Daniels is taking cues from the era of O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky.

On cable news these days, there are very few people who have approached President Trump’s ubiquity. In fact, there is only one, and his name is Michael Avenatti. (Stormy who?)

Avenatti is not the first attorney to understand how the publicity game is played. Litigators are often like this: brash, aggressive, and sophisticated media manipulators. But Avenatti is the first celebrity lawyer of the Trump age, and it’s for that reason that he has become ultra-famous: Everything to do with Trump becomes, for good or ill, a star. And so it is with Avenatti, who in the public imagination has become not just “Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti,” but simply “Michael Avenatti,” and appears to live inside your TV set.

The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.